Why founders need emotional intelligence as much as capital

Organisational success in this disruptive, fast-paced, AI-driven era depends on people's ability to manage uncertainty, not just strategy or innovation. With a career spanning decades and industries such as business, fashion, education, and leadership, Deborah Pandit-Sawaf, Founder of The Power of Words India Private Limited, has consistently promoted emotional intelligence as a vital skill for sustainable success. In a conversation with Economic Times Digital, Sawaf talks about how empathy, self-awareness, and emotionally adept leadership are now considered fundamental requirements for creating resilient founders, cohesive teams, and future-ready organizations, rather than being categorized as "soft skills." Edited excerpts.

(ET): You have worked across business, fashion, education, and leadership initiatives. How did your entrepreneurial journey lead you to focus specifically on emotional intelligence as a core foundation for building resilient organizations?

Deborah Pandit-Sawaf (DPS): My entrepreneurial journey taught me that strategy may build a company, but human emotional wisdom sustains it. I have worked in environments driven by performance, creativity, pressure, and constant reinvention, and across all of them I saw the same truth: people do not break down because they lack intelligence; they break down because they lack the emotional strength, tools, language, and support to navigate stress, uncertainty, conflict, and change.


For me, emotional intelligence is not a “soft” skill or idea. It is a resilience infrastructure. It shapes how leaders communicate under pressure, how teams recover from setbacks, how trust is built, and how culture holds when growth becomes difficult. My own journey made this deeply personal. I came to understand that when people do not have the words to express what they feel, they often carry stress silently until it affects performance, relationships, and well-being which leads to the breakdown, loneliness and isolation.

That is what led me to build The Power of Words. I wanted to create practical frameworks that help people strengthen self-awareness, communication, empathy, and resilience in a simple way that can be applied in schools, institutions, and organizations alike. In today’s world, the strongest organizations will not only be the most innovative; they will be the most emotionally intelligent.

ET: Entrepreneurship is often associated with speed, pressure, and uncertainty. In your view, how can founders use emotional intelligence to navigate stress, setbacks, and decision-making more effectively?

DPS: Founders are asked to make high-stakes decisions while carrying enormous pressure, often with very little emotional margin. Emotional intelligence helps them respond rather than react, which is one of the first lessons in our leadership training. That distinction is everything.

A founder with emotional intelligence is better able to notice stress before it becomes distortion. They are more likely to separate fear from fact, urgency from panic, and temporary setbacks from permanent failure. That creates better judgment. It also helps founders communicate more clearly with investors, employees, partners, and customers during difficult moments.

Emotional intelligence also matters because entrepreneurship can be isolating. Many founders become so identified with the business that every setback feels personal. When leaders have the tools to regulate emotions, ask for support, reflect honestly, and remain connected to purpose, they make stronger decisions and model healthier leadership for the entire organization.

In a startup, pressure is inevitable. Emotional implosion is not. The founders who last are not always the loudest or fastest; they are often the ones who can stay grounded in uncertainty and lead with clarity when others are overwhelmed.

ET: Many startups focus heavily on product and growth metrics in the early stages. Why do you believe emotional awareness and culture-building should be priorities for entrepreneurs from the very beginning?

DPS: Because culture starts forming long before a company calls it culture. It begins with how people speak to one another, how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, whether people feel safe telling the truth, and whether the leadership team behaves consistently under pressure.

In the early stages, founders are often focused on funding, product-market fit, and speed. Of course those matter. But if emotional awareness is absent, unhealthy patterns become embedded very quickly. Misalignment, burnout, miscommunication, fear-based decision- making, and silent resentment can scale just as fast as revenue.

When entrepreneurs prioritize emotional awareness from the beginning, they are building more than morale; they are building operational strength. Teams collaborate better, feedback flows earlier, trust deepens faster, and people become more adaptive in times of uncertainty. That is not separate from performance. It is what supports sustainable performance. Implementing and EI culture of communication, support and trust are vital to any organization, any relationship.

The businesses that endure are not just built on ambition. They are built on human maturity.

ET: Through The Power of Words Foundation, you have developed frameworks like the Find Your Magic curriculum and the Band-Bond Initiative. How can tools like these help entrepreneurs better understand team dynamics and human behaviour inside fast-growing organizations?

DPS: What we have built at The Power of Words is designed to make emotional intelligence visible, practical, and usable in everyday life. That matters in fast-growing organizations because teams are often moving too quickly to stop and decode what is actually happening beneath the surface.

Tools like Find Your Magic and the Band-Bond Initiative help create a shared language around emotions, values, communication, and behaviour. Instead of leaders guessing why a team is disengaged, reactive, disconnected, or misaligned, they begin to recognize patterns more clearly. They can identify what people may be carrying, how they respond under pressure, and where support or recalibration is needed.

The power of these tools is that they are simple enough to use, but deep enough to open meaningful conversations. They help individuals better understand themselves, and they help teams better understand one another. In entrepreneurial environments where speed can easily erode connection, these frameworks bring humanity back into the operating system.

And when people feel seen, heard, and understood, they tend to perform with more trust, accountability, and resilience.

ET: In today’s workplace, founders are managing increasingly diverse, multi- generational teams. What role does emotional intelligence play in building cultures of trust, empathy, and collaboration?

DPS: Emotional intelligence is the bridge. In multi-generational and diverse teams, people may differ in communication style, expectations, emotional expression, work rhythms, cultural norms, and even their understanding of leadership itself. Without emotional intelligence, those differences can easily become friction. With it, they can become strength.

Founders do not need everyone to think the same way. They need teams to feel respected, understood, and connected to a common purpose. Emotional intelligence helps leaders listen better, communicate with more nuance, reduce unnecessary defensiveness, and create environments where people can contribute without fear.

Trust is built when people feel emotionally safe. Empathy grows when leaders take time to understand perspective, not just output. Collaboration becomes stronger when teams are not constantly misreading one another’s intent.

As workplaces become more diverse, leadership must become more emotionally fluent. That is how innovation becomes inclusive rather than fragmented. Broader workplace and skills discussions are also increasingly pointing to human collaboration, communication, and adaptability as critical capabilities alongside digital readiness.

ET: We are entering an era where AI and automation are transforming the way businesses operate. Why do you believe human capabilities such as empathy, emotional awareness, and communication will become even more important for entrepreneurs?

DPS: The more technology advances, the more valuable distinctly human capabilities become.

AI can accelerate analysis, automate tasks, improve efficiency, and even support decision-making. But it cannot replace human judgment rooted in empathy, values, trust, and emotional nuance. It cannot build authentic culture. It cannot sense the unspoken tension in a room, restore confidence after disappointment, or inspire people through uncertainty in the way a deeply human leader can.

We are entering a period where competitive advantage will not come only from adopting AI quickly. It will come from integrating AI wisely while strengthening the human capabilities that machines cannot replicate. Entrepreneurs who understand this will build organizations that are not only faster, but wiser.

That is why I often say: in the age of AI, the human is not less important, the human is more important. The future belongs to leaders who can combine technological intelligence with emotional intelligence. Current workforce reporting reflects both sides of this equation: Indian business leaders are moving quickly on AI adoption, while global future-of-work analyses continue to highlight human-centered skills such as resilience, collaboration, empathy, and communication as essential for the next era of work.

ET: From your work with leaders and institutions globally, what are some common emotional blind spots that entrepreneurs tend to have when building companies and leading teams?

DPS: One common blind spot is believing that high performance excuses poor emotional behaviour. Many entrepreneurs are brilliant, driven, and visionary, but they underestimate the effect their tone, stress, inconsistency, or silence has on the people around them. That is carried outside the work place into their personal life and relationships.

Another blind spot is confusing control with leadership. In periods of uncertainty, some founders become overly reactive or overly dominant because they are afraid. But when fear drives leadership, trust suffers. Teams may comply outwardly while disconnecting internally.

A third blind spot is underestimating burnout, in themselves and in others. Entrepreneurs often normalize exhaustion, emotional suppression, and hyper-vigilance as part of the journey. But when people operate too long in survival mode, creativity, judgment, and collaboration begin to erode.

Finally, many leaders still underestimate the power of communication. They think clarity means giving direction. True clarity also means creating understanding, emotional safety, and alignment. People do not only need to know what the plan is. They need to know they matter within it, and that they are a part of the plan.

ET: As The Power of Words expands its initiatives into India, what opportunities do you see for Indian entrepreneurs to integrate emotional intelligence into leadership, innovation, and workplace culture?

DPS: India is at a defining moment in its history, a moment of extraordinary possibility, influence, and responsibility. I was deeply honored, on my very first visit, to be invited by the founder and leadership team of MIT World Peace University.

India has extraordinary entrepreneurial energy, a young talent base, deep ambition, and a growing global influence across technology, enterprise, education, and innovation. That creates a powerful opportunity: India can help define not only what the future of business builds, but how it builds it.

I believe Indian entrepreneurs have the opportunity to embed emotional intelligence early, not as an afterthought, but as a leadership advantage. They can build companies where innovation and empathy coexist, where speed does not come at the cost of humanity, and where performance is strengthened by trust, communication, and resilience.

This is especially important now, as organizations navigate scale, generational change, digital transformation, and the rise of AI. India does not need to choose between ambition and well-being, or between growth and human values. It can lead with both. In fact, I believe the world is looking for that leadership now, leadership that proves progress and humanity can rise together.

That is one of the reasons launching The Power of Words India matters so much to us. We see India not simply as a market, but as a powerful catalyst for a global movement, a place where emotionally intelligent leadership can shape not only stronger workplaces, but stronger communities, stronger institutions, and a stronger future. Through the upcoming HUMAIN Summit, we want to bring together leaders who understand that this is not just a business conversation; it is a human one. India’s workforce and leadership landscape is being reshaped by digital adoption and AI, which makes the case for human-centered leadership even more urgent.

India has the opportunity to show the world that the future of leadership does not belong to technology alone, it belongs to those who know how to keep humanity at the center of progress.